Protests & Promises In Colombia
The violence that has ravaged Colombia for more than three decades did not take a holiday when President Clinton arrived for a 12-hour trip to personally deliver an aid package meant to fight drugs and Marxist rebels. He returned to Washington early Thursday morning.
CBS News Correspondent Bob Orr reports that in Bogota, the capital, protesters denounced what they called "Yankee intervention" in their country and battled police, killing one officer.
Four hundred miles north, in the coastal resort city of Cartegena, police arrested three rebel sympathizers and confiscated what the Secret Service called "bomb making materials" at a home about six blocks from a spot Mr. Clinton would visit hours later.
The 4.4-pound bomb was planted by rebels and designed to "cause panic but not huge damage," a police spokesman told Reuters. He said two men, believed to be members of the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC), the country's largest guerrilla force, had been arrested.
More than 5,000 soldiers and police, 350 U.S. Secret Service agents, helicopter gunships and navy patrol boats were drafted into Cartagena to protect Mr. Clinton during his day-long stay.
The president's trip to Colombia was aimed at propping up the nation's fight against drugs and insurgents. The Clinton administration is funneling $1.3 billion in drug-fighting aid to Colombia that includes U.S. military advisors and hardware.
"Colombia's democracy is under attack," Mr. Clinton said in an address televised to Colombians on the eve of his visit. "Profits from the drug trade fund civil conflict. Powerful forces make their own law, and you face danger every day."
|
"A condition of this aid is that we are not going to get into a shooting war. This is not Vietnam, neither is it Yankee imperialism," the president said.
Thousands of Colombians, many of them waving white T-shirts and handkerchiefs in an apparent demonstration for peace, turned out in the steamy weather to greet the president as he drove from the airport to the Port of Cartagena.
At the Port of Cartagena, Colombian President Andres Pastrana took Clinton on a tour of the busy commercial port, showing him captured speed boats used for smuggling and shipping containers in which drugs had been found.
The two presidents petted drug-sniffing dogs and consoled widows and children left behind by officers killed in the drug war.
To show the strength of U.S. support, he brought with him 11 members of Congress, including a top Republican, House Speaker Dennis Hastert, and a host of top officials, including Barry McCaffrey, director of the U.S. national drug control policy.
"My view on this thing, we lose 14,000 of our kids every year on our street corners, in very wealthy affluent neighborhoods and the poorest, to drugs and drug violence, and we need to do something about it," Hastert said.
The U.S. part of President Pastrana's "Plan Colombia" is aimed at helping the Colombian military take control of cocaine-producing regions held by the guerrillas and paramilitary groups.
Officials say 90 percent of the cocaine reaching the U.S. and more than 70 percent of the heroin comes from Colombia.
The U.S. assistance includes funds for 60 combat helicopters and training for the Colombian military, plus money for building schoolrooms, water systems and roads, judicial reform and protecting human rights.
Last week, Mr. Clinton waived conditions for the release of the U.S. aid that are aimed at overcoming military abuses and bringing human rights violators to justice.
The decision prompted protests from human rights groups and some lawmakers.
Critics also question whether the beefed up U.S. aid to Colombia may do more harm than good, ratcheting up the violence in the country's 36-year-old civil war and doing little to staunch the flow of drugs to the United States.
If Colombia gets too hot for traffickers, they'll simply move to friendlier turf, critics charge.
Besides fighting drug traffickers, Pastrana is trying to nudge the nation out of recession. Economic growth declined 3.5 percent in 1999, although it was up by 2.2 percnt in the first quarter of this year. Unemployment reached 20 percent in mid-1999, but is on the decline.
Elected on a peace platform, Pastrana also is trying to negotiate an end to hostilities with Marxist guerillas and right-wing paramilitary groups. In conflict with the state for 36 years, both engage in kidnapping and other acts of violence against citizens, foreigners, the government and commercial installations, such as oil pipelines.
In the past day rebel fighters have attacked security forces and bombed banks and energy infrastructure in at least eight of Colombia's 32 provinces in protest at the visit.